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Choose Smarter: Ten... Sata 3 SSDs

Solid choices for an essential upgrade

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SanDisk Extreme 240GB

SanDisk’s Extreme 240GB SSD uses combination of a SandForce SF-2281 controller and eight of its own 32GB 24nm Toggle NAND memory chips. The latest SSD from one of the masters of flash memory development certainly lives up to its name, with quoted sequential read/writes of up to 550MB/s and 520MB/s respectively.

On the downside there’s nothing in the way of extras; no mounting kit or even any disk migration software to help the drive to be set up in the box, nor are any other versions of the drive offered with either of these two options included. Still, you can find this drive for a promotional price on-line for around £170 which is certainly worth thinking about.

Zalman F1 240GB

Zalman is same South Korean-based firm that makes those beautifully designed and built ‘flower’ CPU coolers amongst a whole host of other cooling products. It’s not the first time Zalman has dabbled with SSDs, but the second generation F1 series – using the ubiquitous SandForce SF-2281 controller – is by far the best performing offering the company has produced to date.

Internally, there no surprises with the F1, it’s all tried and tested hardware from the controller to the 25nm MLC Intel NAND memory it uses. The Zalman F1 is another drive that doesn’t offer anything in box by way of a bundle but the company does offer the very good Acronis True Image HD utility but annoyingly only as a download. With a respectable read speed, its write performance was in the lower ranks and it's expensive too. ®